Jackie Hurwitz drinks coffee at Intelligentsia in Chicago in 2010. Hurwitz says that she rarely drinks it, maybe one or two times a week. "I prefer it when I have it with a couple of friends. I will drink a cup as long as I enjoy it," Hurwitz said. (JosÈ M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

Intelligentisa coffee is available at a Shell gas station in Hinsdale in 2010. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

A latte made at the Intelligentsia Coffee Roasting plant in Chicago is pictured in 2003. (Bonnie Trafelet / Chicago Tribune)

When Intelligentsia Coffee started in Chicago in 1995, its means of making the best coffee it possibly could was to serve it within days of roasting it.

The company has since grown from retail to commercial sales, from one city to three, and from specialty coffeehouse to mass specialty purveyors, with a key lesson learned:

If shortening the time between roasting and cup mattered, so does lessening the time from field to roasting.

“I lose a lot of sleep over the fact that specialty coffee is an emerging market. They all do the same things. We all roast fresh,” said Stephen Morrissey, director of communications for Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, now based in Los Angeles. "We get the coffee from the farm to the cup more quickly. Fresh-roasted, fresh-brewed is important. Fresh-grown is another shelf life that’s important."

Imagine a list of five luxury goods, and it’s unlikely coffee will be among them. The global coffee supply chain feels the same way. At the shipping port in Honduras, containers of once-fresh coffee beans are likely to be “baking in the sun for weeks and weeks and weeks,” Morrissey said. “It’s a stinky hot-air town.”

Bananas are shipped quickly, while port officials think coffee is more durable, he lamented.

But customers pay more for goods with a whiff of luxury about them, and that’s the goal Intelligentsia has set for itself as a company and as a purchaser. It flies producers to global meetings to share ideas and techniques. It has incentivized growers who follow best practices and consistently grow and pick high-quality beans. It pays shippers in cash to prioritize their containers.

Instead of months, Intelligentsia has gotten beans from field to cup in six to eight weeks on average – longer in inaccessible corners of Africa but as few as four weeks from Brazil.

“What defines specialty coffee is an absence of defects,” Morrissey said. “It comes from a cherry. It’s the seed of a fruit. Coffee has the properties of the fruit. When you get it at the perfect ripeness, you get that flavor. I think one of the few things that distinguishes Intelligentsia is that if it tastes good, the farmer did a good job.”

At Intelligentsia, Morrissey said improving the supply chain gave the company a competitive edge in a crowded and choosy market.

Faced with high-ticket luxury competitors – and averse to getting entangled in a low-cost commodity competition – Intelligentsia’s attention to sourcing addressed several concerns: It allowed the company to provide customers with a premium product they’d be willing to pay for while also allowing them to improve on Fair Trade and green credentials by achieving higher direct-trade returns. That leaves more money in farmers’ pockets, Morrissey said, and it increases customers’ willingness to pay.

More practically, it allowed Intelligentsia to buy in higher quantities, drive supply-chain innovations as its purchasing power increased and share lessons learned among suppliers in Guatemala, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia and elsewhere.

“For us to deliver a great experience, we have to source good coffee,” Morrissey said.